


like brambles to the cedars

by angevin2



Category: Thomas of Woodstock (Play)
Genre: Culture Shock, F/M, Inappropriate Hussites, Medieval Ladies Doing Needlework
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-22
Updated: 2013-12-22
Packaged: 2018-01-05 12:52:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,090
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1094089
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/angevin2/pseuds/angevin2
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Queen Anne isn't used to English customs. It doesn't help that her husband and his uncles can't agree on what they are.</p>
            </blockquote>





	like brambles to the cedars

**Author's Note:**

  * For [skazka](https://archiveofourown.org/users/skazka/gifts).



> I absolutely adored this prompt, and it was a complete party to write. This fic isn't tremendously reliant on a sense of chronology, but I have taken the playwright's anything-goes attitude toward historical accuracy to heart.
> 
> Many, many thanks to G. and K. for their input, and to I. for helping me with the Bohemian lyrics! Any errors in translation are the result of my choice of wording.

Queen Anne – as they call her in English; she is learning to think of herself as _Anne_ and not _Anna_ \-- used to sing to herself while sewing.

As a child learning needlework she would chant hymns under her breath -- always hymns, because other kinds of songs didn't have the right kind of rhythm. Love songs tend to wander all over the place and wind around themselves, and if you followed their thread you'd get your own all tangled up.

She feels better about love songs, now that she is married. But the habit remains.

She only does it now, though, when she's alone, for once she'd been repairing linens with the Duchesses of Gloucester and Ireland when she'd noticed their eyes on her and heard her own voice in her ears, singing the old hymn to Saint Wenceslaus, and she'd stopped abruptly and coughed and explained to them that she'd always done it when she was learning embroidery and that she didn't know any songs in English.

Today, though, she is alone except for her own ladies who have come with her from Bohemia, and nobody will look at her like a curiosity if she forgets herself, and so as she sits in her solar working her way through a pile of old smocks that will eventually be used to line garments for the poor, she lets her mind and her voice wander through all the old tunes: 

" _Jezu Kriste, štědrý kněže,_  
 _s Otcem, s Duchem jeden Bože,_  
 _tvoje štědrost naše zboží_  
 _Kyrieleison_."

It's a sweet song, a gentle song, and it eases her mind. Anne has been worried, often, about the state of affairs in her new homeland, now that she has had time to adjust to it, and to her new husband. She loves Richard, with all her heart. She wishes that people other than his flattering friends loved him as well. 

Still, she also wishes that Richard wouldn't tax his subjects so much in order to maintain his court. It's quite a lovely court – Richard himself is as fashionable as the finest young gallants in Prague, and as beautiful, she thinks, as any man in the world – but the English don't seem to approve of it at all, and, if Richard's uncles are to be believed, it wouldn't matter even if money were no object. The Lord Protector himself dresses like a husbandman – you would think, to see him, that he had just come in from plowing his fields. It's how people are in England, he says, never mind these gilded lordlings. So Anne had taken to wearing her most ordinary dresses, and had had some new ones made in russets and kerseys and coarser linens, as English ladies were, she thought, accustomed to wear, and Richard had found it very disappointing. "Of course you're beautiful in anything," he'd said, "but a queen should wear damasked silk and Rennes linen, not woolen homespun – I don't know what Thomas has been telling you." 

He doesn't, however, mind the sight of her now, sitting on a cushion in a simple green kirtle with her hair in a plait, and when she notices him standing in the doorway watching her, she smiles up at him.

"I didn't know you could sing," he says, grinning at her. "I quite like it."

"Oh, I don't, really," Anne says, snipping off a piece of thread and motioning to her ladies to withdraw before extending a hand toward Richard, and he takes it as he moves to sit down, raising it to his lips before he sets her linen aside and stretches out among the rushes with his head in her lap. "Only when I'm doing needlework."

"You should sing more," Richard says. "Sing me something?"

Anne can feel her cheeks grow warm – singing hymns doesn’t feel quite right, not with Richard's head in her lap, and the only other song she can think of is the one that comes to her mind whenever Richard comes to her bed. Which is often enough that she resolves not to be embarrassed about _singing_ about it; she bends over him, brushing his lips with the end of her plait, and begins:

" _Otep myrrhy mnět' mój milý_  
 _milujet' mì z své všie síly_  
 _a já jeho z milelého_  
 _proňžt netbám nic na jiného_ …"

"Is that how your native tongue sounds?" Richard asks, when she's finished, and when she nods, he replies, "It's very pretty. Although anything you say is pretty, really." He reaches up to stroke her face with the back of his fingers. "What does it mean?"

Anne runs her own fingers through his curls, golden thread against the green of her skirt. "'A bundle of myrrh is my love to me,'" she says, "'he loves me with all his might; and I love him, my dear one, and I don't care for anyone else.'" She feels her cheeks go warm, for she knows more than she can say -- that she is not, for all the tenderness he shows her, Richard's _only_ love, that others (Henry Green, for one) have a place in his affections and in his bed -- but Richard only smiles.

"And so I do," Richard says, taking up her free hand and kissing her fingers, but his face darkens as he notices the calluses. "You work too hard, Nan," he says, examining her fingers closely. "You shouldn't have to do that. Do queens always work so much in Bohemia?"

"Oh, not at all," Anne says, disentangling her fingers from Richard's hair and covering his hand with her own. "Although my mother is an Empress, and perhaps that's different." She smiles at him. "I thought it was a custom _here_!"

"Only if you listen to my uncles," Richard says, frowning outright. "They have no idea how kings and queens should live – well, of course they _do,_ they're just trying to ruin it for _us_ because they're jealous. But they'll never get to be king."

"No," Anne says, and then she sighs. "I wish you and they wouldn't fight so much, Richard. I worry about you, you know."

"I know," Richard says, kissing her hand again. "But I'll be of age soon, and then you won't have to."

This isn't precisely what she'd meant, but she lets it go. There are some things she's not quite ready to say to him.

"Will you sing me the song you were singing before?" Richard says. "It was beautiful. Like you," he adds, grinning.

She smiles and returns to her song, but the _Kyrieleison_ sticks in her throat.

**Author's Note:**

>  **the old hymn to Saint Wenceslaus** : Or _Svatý Václave._ This hymn, dating to the twelfth century, is still known in the Czech Republic today, where it has strong nationalist associations (it was sung at the funeral of Václav Havel). You can hear a relatively modern arrangement of it here.
> 
>  **Jezu Kriste, štědrý kněže** is another old Bohemian hymn. The text translates as "Jesus Christ, bountiful priest, / with the Father and the Spirit one God, / your generosity is our treasure. / Lord have mercy." Authorship of this hymn is sometimes attributed to the proto-Protestant reformer Jan Hus, although it seems that he actually just arranged it. Hus was an admirer of the English reformer John Wyclif, whose teachings may have been transmitted to Bohemia by members of Anne's retinue who returned home after her death in 1394; it is also sometimes speculated that Anne herself was sympathetic to the Wycliffite movement, but the evidence for this is fairly shaky. It is, however, true that her brother Wenceslaus IV had initially supported Hus before changing his mind and handing him over to the archbishop to be tried and burned at the stake in 1415. My use of this hymn isn't really meant to be any sort of statement on Anne's religious opinions, but, assuming the author of _Woodstock_ was an English Protestant, he would probably have appreciated it. The abuse of the timeline required for Anne to know a song written by Jan Hus is, of course, also in keeping with the _Woodstock_ playwright's attitude to historical accuracy.
> 
>  **Otep myrrhy** is a fourteenth-century Bohemian love song with lyrics based loosely on the Song of Songs. The translation is, of course, given in the text. I couldn't find a recording of the original tune suitable for linking here, so have a [modern setting](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJrUTlrWOOk). It's sung by a children's choir, so don't think about it too hard in the context in which I mentioned it.


End file.
